Bad news from the Vaal Dam

A friend who lives in Parys has moved his family, animals and chattel to higher ground. He did this because on Saturday the department of water & sanitation warned people living downstream of the Vaal Barrage that a tsunami — 7,300m³ per second of water — would be let go from the Vaal Dam.

Following the communiqué, a word increasingly at odds with a government that would struggle to tell citizens that the wind was blowing even as a hurricane ripped the roofs off their houses, chaos ensued as people grabbed what they could and left their homes to the coming flood.

As it turned out, the released water topped “only” 3,900m³, still enough to flood houses, drown bridges and obliterate livelihoods.

My friend is someone who knows rivers like a migrating goose knows its way home, so when he tells me about rivers and dams I listen. 

The disaster is simply a failure to act, followed by another to communicate. After a long wet season, the Vaal Dam is already full. Its sluice gates should have been opened when the rains started in earnest two weeks ago, to ease the pressure on the wall as the reservoir’s level rose to 110%. On Tuesday it stood at 118%.

One of the world’s great myths is that dams are built to control floods and yet here we are, again, watching a flood caused by a dam. 

My dad used to call South Africa “the lucky country”, always stepping back from the brink of disaster at the last second. But what was brinkmanship before now increasingly looks like Russian roulette with six rounds in the chamber instead of one, while the people living along the muddy banks of the Vaal are the ones catching stray bullets in the back.